Take Shelter: Behind the Movie's Storm-Shelter Tech and Wild VFX

In Take Shelter, out Sept. 30, Curtis (Michael Shannon) begins to have vivid dreams of an ominous storm that drops a thick, oily rain. Soon he's seeing flocks of birds drop dead from the sky and the giant storm cells when he's awake, too. To protect his wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and deaf daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart) for the storm he's sure is coming, Curtis builds a shelter and buries it in his backyard. In January, we sat down with director Jeff Nichols at the Sundance Film Festival to talk about his wonderfully creepy film and how to build a shipping-container storm shelter.

Where did the idea for Take Shelter come from?

There was this general sense of anxiety I was feeling out in the world, and I kind of wanted to bottle that. And then for some reason I was standing in my backyard and I had a vision of a guy standing over an open storm shelter. I dont know where it came from, but I found it interesting, and I wondered what that guy was doing. I started to develop the story based on those two things, and I was in the first year of my marriage, and I was thinking a lot about how does marriage work, how does it not work, what it means to communicate.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The storms in the film are very strangeand they have a very strange effect on people. What characteristics did you want the storm to have?

We leave that really unclearits effects are never explained, theyre intermittent. The best way to talk about the storms is as a metaphor, I suppose. But practically speaking, Id been looking at all of these photographs of real storm cells in the Midwestthe best effects house in the world couldnt come up with this stuff. So I knew that was the look I wanted. The oily rain just seemed like some messed up stuff, [a sign that] things arent right.

Most Popular

A lot of things that happened in Take Shelter have been in the news recently. It made the film even spookier.

It was really bizarre. During the shooting of this film, the Deepwater Horizon thing happened. I went back to the hotel, and I turned on the TV and it was Larry King Live with T. Boone Pickens. And Larry King goes, T. Boone, is it going to rain oil? And I was like, Ive got to get this movie made! T. Boone Pickens said that the puddles of oil on the ground that people were taking videos of and posting on YouTube couldnt have come from the sky. He was [saying], A lot of oil is getting dumped out there, but theres a lot of water out there. The amount of oil versus the amount of water in the Gulf of Mexico, its not enough to cause oil to fall out of the sky.

And just a few weeks ago, birds start to drop dead in Arkansas. My effects company sent me a still and they were like, Is this some kind of publicity stunt? This is creeping us out, you need to stop this.

How did you pull off the films visual effects?

Im pragmatic, Im not just a crazy artist. It doesnt do me any good to sit down and write $40 million films in my bedroom. But I wrote this film with no real clue of [how to accomplish] the effects component. I didnt think that one through. Luckily, my agent at the time was representing the Strause Brothers from Hydraulx, and he sent them [my first film], Shotgun Stories, and he sent them script for Take Shelter. They were willing to come on board and do the effects for a very, very reduced price.

Technically, they did algorithms to map bird formations based on starling movement, and they 3D-modeled an entire room [for one shot]they told me they hadnt done so much work on a single shot since Avatar.

What about the storm cells? Theyre incredible lookingvery ominous and very real. What was the secret there?

With a ton of money and a ton of time, they would build fake 3D cloud models, and that way you could spin them all around, make them move as fast or as slow as you want. But they werent going to 3D-model all of our storm cells. So Hydraulx found a guy who had taken pictures of a lot of amazing storm cells in the Midwest, and they bought some of his photos for their library and put them up in 2D. Theres a lot less maneuverability, but I didnt need them to be crazy storms spinning around. I just needed the slow, ominous movement. So the clouds in the film look very real, and thats because theyre real clouds.

Its a great example of constraints on budget, and constraints on time, playing to your favor. Because if wed had the time or the money to 3D-model all those clouds, we would have been sitting there going: Does that look real? As opposed to: Are those real clouds moving enough? Id much rather be in that position. Independent films are breaking ground on this stuff because were doing things that other people [with bigger budgets] wont try, because, why would you?

What kind of research did you do for the film?

I had to totally design the storm shelter. A lot of that gets glossed over in the movie . . . but I figured out how to bury a shipping container, how to fuse it to a concrete structure and not have it leak, how to provide proper ventilation, how to run electricity off of marine batteries rather than car batteries. I had little designs and charts of how the storm shelter would work. Because in a weird way, its also a process movieyou see each step. It made it really hard to shoot, actually, because we had to shoot all that in order: He has to first discover the storm shelter, then he has to dig the hole, then he has to bury the shipping container, add the whirly birds, and then cover it in dirt. That made things tricky.